Grateful Dead's Bob Weir debuts TRI Studios on Web

Music Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead premieres a recording-broadcast studio on the Web

Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Correspondent

Published 4:00 am, Monday, June 6, 2011

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

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Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead discusses the main recording room at TRI Studios on Wednesday, May 26, 2011, in San Rafael, Calif.

Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead discusses the main recording room at TRI Studios on Wednesday, May 26, 2011, in San Rafael, Calif.

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

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Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead plays guitar at TRI Studios on Wednesday, May 26, 2011, in San Rafael, Calif.

Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead plays guitar at TRI Studios on Wednesday, May 26, 2011, in San Rafael, Calif.

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

Grateful Dead's Bob Weir debuts TRI Studios on Web

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"A lot of guys when they have a little success in life, they go out and buy a yacht or a fancy car or something. What I did was go out and buy a flying saucer."

That's how the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir describes his new toy, a multimillion-dollar recording and broadcast facility in San Rafael called TRI Studios, which he took on a shakedown cruise recently before two dozen guests and the rest of the world via a live Webcast.

Weir gathered members of his band Ratdog and four horn players from the Marin Symphony to sample Grateful Dead repertoire in the main room of the Tamalpais Research Institute, as Weir calls his place. The small invited crowd included Jerry Garcia's ex-girlfriend Mountain Girl and Dead lyricist John Barlow, along with Weir's wife and family. The 11,500-square-foot complex includes the 2,000-square-foot main studio, a smaller studio, two mixing rooms and five additional isolation rooms, all interconnected, for audio and HD video recording, plus enough server power to run a small government bureaucracy. At the heart of the main room is the revolutionary Meyers Sound Constellation System, an entirely new approach to public audio developed for the classical field by Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley.

The room contains more than 80 separate speakers and a couple of dozen microphones all over the room to pick up and disperse sound. The entire system is run through sophisticated software capable of duplicating various acoustic environments, from a baseball park to a small nightclub, all controlled from a tablet computer on the bandstand.

"What we're looking to do is create a new venue for musicians," says Weir.

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Weir, who undertook this bold step into the future largely with his own money, found the building in foreclosure in an industrial park on the edge of San Rafael. On the other side of the wall, James Hetfield of Metallica keeps his hot rod chop shop, and across the street is Sammy Hagar's studio.

Almost alone among major rock groups, the Dead always devoted a lot of resources to research and development projects and, along the way, sponsored some major innovations in concert sound production, musical instrument construction and more.

With TRI, Weir continues this tradition, following his own fascination with the possibilities for musicians posed by the Web.

Weir admits he has built it, but does not yet know if they will come. He rented the space to Journey for a pre-tour sound check and rehearsal. He plans to produce further Webcasts on his own (he brings in his band with Deadmate Phil Lesh, Furthur, for a pay-per-view Webcast today). He does say the studio "has to pay for itself." He is just not sure how it will at this point.

Weir first tried the Meyers Constellation at the company's Berkeley headquarters with Ratdog. "We were smitten with what we could do," he says, "but we needed more horsepower."

Audio engineer John Meyer, who has built, he thinks, "around 30" of the systems throughout the world for classical orchestras, has worked with rock bands since he hot-rodded Steve Miller's gear for the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

"Bobby comes from a different part of the world than the classical people," says Meyer. "He asked 'Can I have an echo?' This is a lot of work we haven't designed it for. I said, 'Do you mind if I ask why - I really shouldn't'? He said he plays to the wall. That he has written songs to the wall. So we did it, and he said, 'I like that - can you move the wall?' So we made a moving wall with sliders on an iPad or an iPhone. He said 'Great - can I have that on a foot pedal?' "

Weir began to demo a show alone on acoustic guitar, keeping time by stomping his foot on a board that was miked. The guitar strings snapped and popped, ringing with crystalline clarity, as Weir sang. "Performers can hear exceptionally well in here," he says. "You hear every shimmer off the piano, every glimmer off the cymbals. It's nothing but pure sound."

Although speakers are hidden in every corner of the room, the effect is not like being bombarded with sound but more like being enveloped. There are none of the strange dissociated sounds found in 5.1 surround sound that have audiences looking over their shoulders in movie theaters to see the exit sign. "It's not surround sound," says Meyer. "That didn't work in any form."

Five cameras, including one on a dolly track directly in front of the musicians, captured the video in startling detail, switched live by director Justin Kreutzmann, whose father was one of the Dead's drummers. With the full band - including both Robin Sylvester of Ratdog on Fender bass and freelance virtuoso Rob Wasserman on stand-up bass - the room filled with sound, uncluttered, surprisingly low volume, vibrant and resonant. Music hung in the air like smoke.

In Weir's world, technology and art merge seamlessly. "A whole lot of the conceptualization is beyond artistry," he says. "I talk to John (Meyer) as an artist. Our conversation is artist to artist. This is squarely in the realm of art."

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